Our Old Friend Death

From my Project 365

(Let me just say, before I get started:  I’m not depressed at all, I swear!)

Early this morning, I’m taking my mom, who is 88, to get surgery for cataracts.  She’ll have her left eye done today and her right eye done in about a month.

Having surgery scares the dickens out of my mom.  Understandably.  She’s had problems with anesthesia in the past (though she won’t need it for this procedure), and when you’re 88 death is on your mind.

I don’t think she’s alone.  Death is wherever you look.

I was thinking about this as I was looking over my Project 365.  There are pictures of dead birds and dead bugs and other things.  There’s the picture of a gray desiccated leaf in the gutter that screams mortality (see above). 

Why do we exercise?  To look younger.  Why do we want to look younger? To escape death. Why do we eat health food?  A lot of times, it’s because we want to be healthy.  Why do we want to be healthy?  See above.  Why do we watch movies and read books and get high and get drunk and sleep too much? Because it’s right there, staring us in the face. Why do we do dangerous things? Why do we have sex?  Why do we build cities?  Why do we create art?  Why do we walk on the moon? Some would say, it’s all symbolic of our fight against time and death.

We spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to run away, to forget the fact.

Why do we have relationships?  Yeah, death, but also because it is the basic human condition to be alone.  We are alone inside our bodies.  We send signals out into the void, hoping to make a connection, but even when we are surrounded by friends, having a great time, assured of our place in the common humanity, we are trapped inside these casings of flesh and bone.  We all die alone.

I was just thinking about why I don’t find this depressing today.  Maybe because I spent a lot of time alone as a child, and I still crave alone time.  And also maybe because I’m surrounded and secure with family and friends.  My needs are met.

Ask me tomorrow.

'Girl,' by Jamaica Kincaid

I love how Jamaica Kincaid uses an innovative structure and the rhythms of language in this piece.  I reread it last night and was once again blown away.

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Girl

by Jamaica Kincaid

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street – flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a button-hole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra – far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles – you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers – you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?  

Patty Chang Anker and Leanne Dyck, Two Very Cool Writers

I have so much to be thankful for, not least of all my great writer friends!

Yesterday, the hilarious and smart and insightful Patty Chang Anker talked on her blog Facing Forty Upside Down about when we first met at Bread Loaf last year.  We were roommates.  Patty writes these hilarious essay about facing her fears, and what is particularly ironic and hilarious in a twisted way is that she was on crutches at Bread Loaf because she had been facing her fear of the ocean and got pummelled by the waves and broke her foot.  Not only that, but just after Bread Loaf she rounded up her family and everything they would need and flew to China.  We’ve been lamenting to each other that we didn’t go to Bread Loaf this year and that we couldn’t be roommates again there! It was such a blast! Patty is simply the best. Here’s her bio. 

Patty is an at-home mother of two girls with special needs, a yoga teacher, and public relations pro by day and a writer and blogger (Facing Forty Upside Down) by night. She is a former Director of Media Relations for The New York Times and veteran publicist for the publishing houses of W.W. Norton, Taunton Press and Basic Books, including campaigns for the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series “How Race is Lived in America,” Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog. Patty is in the midst of writing an undoubtedly hilarious nonfiction book about facing your fears. For an example of her great writing, click here. http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/family/blogs-books/patty-chang-anker-stress-relief-technique.  

So Patty so kindly mentioned me yesterday, and now there's today!

 

The wonderful Leanne Dyck invited me to stop by her blog to talk about writing, which should be posted today on her blog The Sweater Curse, which is also the name of her book.  I know Leanne only through the web, but we’ve had some nice conversations and I can’t wait to read more of her work.

Here’s a little about Leanne.

Leanne Dyck began her knitwear design career in August 2002. Her patterns have sold nationally and internationally including to Britain, Australia, and Israel. Shortly after the The Sweater Curse was published, Leanne closed Olavia's hand knitting patterns to write full-time. Writing is a solitary sport, but Leanne is a team player. She bats for the Crime Writers of Canada and is in goal for the Mayne Island Writers Group.

Thank you both, Patty and Leanne, for letting me hang with you cool people!

Making Progress

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I haven’t talked much about my writing recently.

I’ve been going great guns on a YA novel.  It feels really good.  It’s hard because there for a while life was getting in the way all the time and I wasn’t making any progress and I was feeling a little desperate.  But now that I am, it feels great!

I’m not going to say much about the YA except that it’s a blast to write!  It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for a long long time.  At first, I thought it would be an adult women’s fiction, but the idea fits perfectly as a YA and if it were to be successful could be a really fun series for both girls and guys. 

I’m taking a week off in August from my day job just to write.  It may be optimistic, but I really am going to try to crank through a first draft by then.  I’m at 16K words and need to get to about 75K. Very ambitious but you have to have goals, otherwise nothing gets done.  Than after that, lots of revision.

Then ~ GULP ~ I’m going to try to tackle a memoir, which scares the dickens out of me!

Superbetter

Superbetter is an app based on the principles of online gaming that promises to extend your life by 10 years.  You work on your social, emotional, mental, and physical resilience, which in turn affects your well being and hence your lifespan. 

Interesting, right?  I can't decide whether it's one of those things that are supposed to make us feel better about ourselves without having any real impact, busywork, or there's something to it.  I imagine it depends on how well you incorporate it.  I do find the game's creator, the game designer Jane McGonigal, very persuasive.  And I really like the principles involved ~ there's definitely something there.

Here's Jane's great TED talk.

A Finite Resource

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Energy is a finite resource.

There’s just this amount of sunlight during the day.  There is only so much oil from just so many plants that powers only this many cars.

I’m sure physicists will argue that energy only changes forms ~ E = mc2 ~ but as far as energy that we can access, it’s limited.

The same goes for personal energy.  A person has only so much energy throughout their life, just as they only have so much time.  This energy is how they affect their world, and how they use it determines how much of an impact they make.

When the energy’s flowing ~ man! ~ I just love it.  If I’m writing and exercising, I’m so much more productive in my work life and at home and in my relationships.  Inertia’s on my side.

But then everything gets stopped up.  There are so many ways that I/we waste energy.  We undermine our own success, and this isn’t as passive as it sounds.  We actively find ways to work against ourselves, whether it’s something we say or avoiding or something else.  Avoiding isn’t a passive thing ~ it’s an active turning away. 

We drink too much, smoke too much, max our credit cards, date the wrong people, have sex with other people while we’re married, abuse ourselves physically and emotionally, overeat, undereat, overexercise, do drugs, and ~ the ultimate self-destruction ~ suicide.

We undermine other’s success too.  If a person finds ways large and small to be needy and destructive and obstructionist at crucial times in another’s life, they’re called crazymakers, and they destroy peoples’ lives and art (see The Artist’s Way). 

Why do we do it?  Why do we spend so much of our energy working at destroying our own energy or someone else’s?  Is it human nature to be self-destructive?  Why are we each other’s death star?

Think how far we each could go if we didn’t do these things.

English Don't Make Sense

My friend Mike posted this for me on Facebook.  Love it! Boy, it takes concentration, though.

Via

"The Chaos" is a poem that demonstrates the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation, written by Dutch writer, traveller, and teacher Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), also known under the pseudonym Charivarius.

The preface: "If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labor to reading six lines aloud."

The Chaos

by Gerard Nolst Trenite

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!